capacity for amazement

As the Lunchbox Buddies mindfully seek to soak ourselves in a spirit gratitude, we invite you to join us.  

Explore the big and small things/actions that inspire your heart to sing: words, music, specific times of the day, images, tastes, smells, sensations...

Rabbi Jonathan Lubliner shared a beautiful inference in his blog post entitled "Radical Gratitude":

The playbook of tradition we know as the siddur (prayer book) is filled with gratitude about the most ordinary of miracles: a prayer upon awakening, a blessing for functional body plumbing, a series of benedictions thanking God for the ability to open our eyes, get out of bed, and put on our clothing.  Jewish  law also mandates the recitation of berakhot  (blessings) before and after food and drink of every kind, and has even established benedictions for seeing a rainbow, hearing thunder, witnessing a shooting star, or seeing the ocean for the first time in a long while.   To view this as the product of a religious tradition overburdened with ritual minutiae misses the point — it isn’t about how the poetry of being furnishes an excuse for the recitation of a formula, but how a liturgy of gratitude can help us overcome the numbing effect of the humdrum, the taking for granted that coats our capacity for amazement with indifference.    The blessing isn’t the words, but our capacity to be surprised, as the philosopher Martin Buber once put it; our recognition of the sublime poetry of God’s world in real time.